Interwoven Selves: Review of From a Broken Web | by Therese Doherty

Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self, (Beacon Press: Boston, 1986).

We arise from the matrix; we redesign its elements; we are woven back into the matrix. This is the religious act of reconnecting. As the word itself tells us, matrix is always mater, mother. (p. 248)

Catherine Keller begins From a Broken Web with a compelling thesis: that ‘separation and sexism have functioned together as the most fundamental self-shaping assumptions of our culture’ (p. 2). From this she weaves an extraordinary exploratory map of the territory of connection and self-definition within and then beyond patriarchal scripts, and how we can form a new model of self-shaping for women, and men. When there is sex-denial on the left, and the straightjacket of femininity on the right, this project seems of particular importance, for to escape from patriarchal gender and all of its destructive consequences means that ‘we must become psychosocially conscious of its causes as they operate deep within ourselves, where we internalize vast, impersonal social patterns’ (p. 95).

Keller defines the patriarchal split selves as the (mostly male) separative self and the (mostly female) soluble self; the former making ‘itself the absolute in that it absolves itself from relation’, while the latter ‘dissolves into relation’ (p. 26). In other words, ‘the soluble woman has embodied connection without self, while the separative male has incarnated self without connection’ (my emphasis; p. 206). This male selfhood, gained at the expense of women’s, is derived from the myth of the hero-warrior who armours himself against the world and his own depths, constantly roaming on adventures, while women wait patiently and dependently, like Penelope, for his return.